Road Trip Reminders
By Ashley Holston
@ashleydholston
I crack open my eyes as my body feels our momentum slow from country highway to residential neighborhood speed. My husband pulls our minivan up to an empty gas station, the giant fluorescent lights overhead immediately causing two of the four sleeping kids in the backseat to stir. I stretch my legs forward, my socked but shoeless feet pushing my purse, backpack, sweater, and blanket farther up the passenger seat floor.
It’s 2:40 in the morning, and my husband, focused solely on the approximately ten-hour journey still ahead, begins bustling around. First he adjusts the rooftop luggage straps—which had started blowing in the wind and loudly smack-smack-smacking the roof at random—then he moves to dispose of the debris already cluttering the floor (this will be the road trip where we won’t have McDonald's and Chick-fil-A trash littering the street the moment the automatic van doors begin to open). He peeks in the back to check on the kids, pausing to loudly whisper, “Maybe we should wake them to see if anyone needs to use the bathroom.”
They won’t need me to wake them up if this noise keeps up much longer, I think to myself. Sure enough, the toddler—who is decidedly not a toddler, but a rising pre-kindergartener whose mom is in denial—starts shifting in her seat, grinding her teeth as she often does when her sleep is disturbed. Just my luck to have a kid with a trait straight from hell—literal gnashing of teeth.
Legs still stretched as far as they can be with all my road trip gear in front of me, I take the opportunity to unclick my seatbelt and give the upper half of my body a good, long twist. I envision myself doing child’s pose and cat cow (the only yoga poses I know by name) as soon as we reach our destination. I scan the four kids in the backseat, each in varying stages of sleep. My precious 4-year-old teeth-gnasher is still restless in a row with her big sis: the unofficial but very intentionally-placed Passer Outer of All The Backseat Things. In the back-backseat are the middle two, my boys, arguably getting the best sleep of everyone and seemingly unbothered by our unnaturally bright, wee morning hour pit stop. Honestly, everyone looks relatively … comfortable. I'd already remarked to my husband how shocked I was that we could fully see out our rear window.
Are you positive everything is packed? Surely something must have been left behind if we had managed to fully pack six people for a four-day, out-of-state road trip, and we weren’t peering through a sliver of the back window over mounds of bags and suitcases, I mused.
Yet here we are, fully following the law, and, with floor space as well! Even with the kids’ fully loaded backpacks, blankets, medicine bag, first aid kit, snack cooler, the grown-up backpacks, and random odds and ends, the kids’ legs dangle freely in front of their seats, no bags propping up their feet as had been the case in most road trips past.
Is my Chrysler Pacifica … magical?
In Harry Potter, Ron Weasley’s dad had a Muggle car, and he used magic to make the interior expand well beyond the scope of what the eye could tell from the outside looking in. Is my husband holding out on some wizardry? Because this whole having-space-in-the-van-while-road-tripping situation is truly the stuff of magic. We’ve all only grown in height (and girth?) since we last trekked from Virginia to Florida. What other explanation could there be? I tuck a blanket next to my daughter’s head, the teeth grinding temporarily stymied. I gaze at this precious child, whose chubby cheeks seem to compete with the slimmed-down limbs that straddle the line of babyhood and childhood. She’s big, but still oh so little. And that’s when it clicks, like a gear momentarily stuck had shifted back into motion.
We don’t have the pack-and-play.
We don’t have the pack-and-play!
To clarify: we didn’t forget the pack-and-play. This isn’t an, Oh snap, let me call nearby family to see if anyone has one we can borrow situation. I'm not frantically perusing the Walmart website to see if there's a cheap one we can snag upon arrival, and I’m not messaging the Airbnb host about additional toddler accommodations.
We didn't forget the pack-and-play, because we don't even own a pack-and-play … anymore, that is.
The youngest baby is a baby no longer, and she sleeps just fine in a big kid bed with her sis when we travel. It is probably a transition that I’d longed for, yet here it is, sooner than my mama-heart ever could have anticipated.
And if we don’t have a pack-and-play? Then we also don’t have a stroller. Or a diaper bag. Or a potty seat (though maybe that still would have been wise to bring). We don’t have a separate bag of unwieldy toddler toys, packed to keep the youngest distracted from the many breakable items at the “family-friendly” Airbnb.
I wonder if I would’ve handled our last trip differently, with four kids ranging from age one to age six, bursting at the literal van hinges with baby and toddler gear, if I had known it would be the last one with the stroller. The last one with the pack-and-play. The last one where the youngest intentionally slept next to our bed, too young to be in a room out of sight. (Or maybe she was ready. Maybe I wasn’t.) But ready or not, two years later, here I am, on a road trip, no pack-and-play in tow, feeling thankful but also a little sad.
Seasons change, as they often do, with little to no warning. The kids keep growing, and one day you turn around and their gangly legs stretch closer to the open van floor, and they pack their own backpacks with road trip entertainment and essentials (very subjective “essentials”, mind you). All you’re left tending to is the youngest who’s stirring in her sleep, and she only really needs you to adjust the blanket you folded up as a pillow—she can handle the rest just fine on her own, thankyouverymuch. As I twist back forward in my seat, cringing a little at the ache in my lower back, I wonder why even good gifts can feel like little losses.
We speed down the highway again, and the little one eventually stops grinding her teeth. We leave the fluorescent lights of our pit stop and head deeper into the inky 3 AM darkness, with just enough light to see a short way up the road ahead. I try to peer into the future. In what ways will this trip be different next go-round? Two of the four will likely be out of car seats, and one day the newfound floor space would be filled with lanky legs. Will we still be in a minivan when that day comes? Will I still need to turn around to help them settle, feel the twinge in my lower back as I adjust their sleepy heads?
I attempt to peer into the future, but it is simply too far ahead. So I look toward the light in the road that’s close. It is just enough for right now.
Guest essay written by Ashley Holston. Ashley resides in Maryland with her college sweetheart husband and their five kids, ages eleven and under, with baby #6 on the way. When not home-educating or shuttling kids to activities, Ashley loves to read, write, spend time with family and friends, and participate in the life of her local church. Her writing has been featured on Risen Motherhood and in Truly Magazine. You can follow Ashley's musings on faith, motherhood, and everyday living on her Substack, On The Way Home, and her Instagram.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.